by Dan Goldberg
John Sengstacke, who owned the largest chain of black newspapers in the country and had met with Attorney General Francis Biddle the year before to discuss wartime cooperation between the black press and the administration, implored the president to undertake sweeping action commensurate with the crisis at hand. Calling on the memory of Lincoln, he asked the president for a proclamation declaring that the federal government believed all men to be equal.39
But Roosevelt was not Lincoln, and he never used the bully pulpit of the White House to advocate for full racial equality. The president responded impersonally, if cordially, to these pleas, saying that he appreciated hearing the concerns.40
Inside the White House, the thought of devoting a Fireside Chat to the subject of race riots was deemed “unwise” by the president’s counselors. At most, Attorney General Biddle argued, the president “might consider discussing it the next time you talk about the overall domestic situation as one of the problems to be considered.”41
Roosevelt thought even that too much, and when he gave a Fireside Chat on July 28, one month after the Detroit riots, he devoted not one word to race. The twenty-nine-minute speech focused instead on the fall of Mussolini.
Historians Philip A. Klinkner and Rogers M. Smith have argued that Roosevelt’s famous political antennae failed to pick up the changes taking place in the spring and summer of 1943. Before the war, it was almost universally accepted by white Americans that they were a superior race. Even among the most progressive class, only a few believed much could or should be done about inequality in the near term. In 1942, when the Double V campaign swept the nation, a National Opinion Research Center Poll found that 62 percent of whites interviewed thought blacks were “pretty well satisfied with things in this country,” while 24 percent thought they were dissatisfied. But by 1943 attitudes were shifting, and a year later, 25 percent of white Americans thought black people were satisfied with their status and 54 percent thought they were dissatisfied.42
“True, white southerners were becoming more restive, but it seems clear that in the context of the war, nationally public attitudes on race had shifted enough that [Roosevelt] could have been more outspoken for reform,” the historians argued.43
In August, another large riot began—this time in New York City—when Margie Polite, a thirty-five-year-old black woman, was arrested by Patrolman James Collins for disorderly conduct outside the Braddock Hotel on 126th Street in Harlem. Robert Bandy, a black soldier on leave, intervened. He and Collins scuffled, and at some point Bandy allegedly took hold of Collins’s nightstick and struck him with it. Bandy tried to run, and Collins shot him in the left shoulder.
The incident was like a spark to kindling on a hot, sweaty night in the city, the kind where the air is thick and humid, and tempers rise to meet the mercury.
Men and women sitting on their fire escapes seeking relief from the stifling heat climbed down the ladders and formed a mob. They lived in those overstuffed, sweltering tenements because of the color of their skin, because the city wouldn’t let them leave the ghetto. They were packed into apartments like animals, and now that they were ready to die so that the best ideals of their country might live, their countrymen beat and slaughtered them like animals.
Their anger wasn’t about Bandy or Collins. It was about those shiny plate-glass windows along 125th Street, those white-owned storefronts of shops where black men and women purchased goods but were refused employment. The windows that were smashed that night stood in for those in power who kept in place the redlining and the racism. They stood in for the Army and the Navy.
The Harlem Hellfighters, the black men who made up the 369th Infantry Regiment, had been sending letters home from Camp Stewart in Georgia in which they told friends and relatives, often in graphic detail, of the gratuitous insults and violence they endured. Harlem’s black press reported on how soldiers were beaten and sometimes lynched in camps across the South. Residents knew of Cleo Wright, and the riots in Detroit and Beaumont. They knew that airplane factories on Long Island, even though desperate for workmen and- women, would not “degrade” their assembly lines with African Americans.
So it came as no surprise to Harlem residents Walter White and Roy Wilkins, his assistant at the NAACP, that their pleas for calm were ignored, drowned out by the sound of shattering plate-glass windows. Bandy would survive, they told the crowd when they arrived on the scene. “Don’t destroy in one night the reputation as good citizens you have taken a lifetime to build,” White said. “Go home—now.”
As White and Wilkins drove along Seventh Avenue they could see they were having little effect.
It took 8,000 New York State guards and 6,600 city police officers to quell the violence. In all, 500 people were arrested—all black, 100 of them women. One week later, when the New York Times examined the causes of the riot, it declared that no one should be surprised: “The principal cause of unrest in Harlem and other Negro communities has been [the] complaint of discrimination and Jim Crow treatment of Negroes in the armed forces.”44
The military’s treatment of African Americans and the racism so much a part of American life was no longer just a political problem. It was a national security issue, impacting war production in the factories and morale in the streets. It was “the worst thing” General George Marshall, the Army’s chief of staff, had to deal with, a situation he feared would “explode right in our faces.”45
The Navy responded to the racial tensions by creating the Special Programs Unit, which would be housed within the Bureau of Naval Personnel in Washington. Its mission would be to coordinate policies and protocols for black sailors so that they were used to their full potential and protected—as much as possible—from humiliation and violence.
At its helm was Lieutenant Commander Christopher S. Sargent, a thirty-one-year-old who had clerked for Supreme Court Justice Benjamin Cardozo and worked in the law firm of Dean Acheson, a future secretary of state. Sargent would later be described as “a philosopher who could not tolerate segregation,” and he waged “something of a moral crusade to integrate the Navy.”46
His official job was as an assistant to the head of the Manpower Policies Section of the Planning and Control Division inside the Bureau of Naval Personnel. The formidable title meant that “the Negro problem landed squarely in his lap.”47
Unlike many more senior officers, Sargent thought the war was the best time to integrate the fleet and told superiors that racial cooperation would create a more efficient fighting force. He brought on two lieutenant commanders: Donald O. Van Ness, who had worked under Armstrong at Great Lakes, and Charles E. Dillon, who was the executive officer under Downes at Hampton. The pair worked for Captain Thomas F. Darden in the Plans and Operations Section of the bureau.48
Among the unit’s highest priorities was to see to it that black men were no longer bunched together at ammunition depots or other installations with little real work to do, and that graduates of Class A naval training schools were given proper assignments—not the kind of busywork that had so enraged men in Boston and Hawaii earlier in the year.
The Bureau of Naval Personnel knew that when men who had trained as electricians or quartermasters ended up spending their days cleaning toilets, it weakened morale throughout the Navy; in July it ordered that all men must be used for work corresponding to their ratings. But the Special Programs Unit found that some naval districts, especially those in the South, simply ignored that directive, seeing black men as just an extra pair of hands to clean up after and carry cargo for white sailors.
The Special Programs Unit pushed the Navy to go further than it ever had; it ordered that, with the exception of some units in the supply departments at South Boston and Norfolk, no black sailor could be assigned to maintenance work and stevedoring in the continental United States.49
But even that wouldn’t be enough. If the Special Programs Unit really wanted to reduce the concentration of black men on shore, then there was only one solution. Black men
would have to be allowed on warships as more than messmen. Knox’s sacred rule could not stand.
It was already obvious to most Navy men that this change was inevitable.
In July, a spokesman for the Navy conceded that Knox’s policy made little sense, telling journalists that he “did not know why it is that colored sailors aren’t being used” at sea. “I am sure something will have to be done,” he said, “but I do not know what.”50
The answer arrived not long after. The Navy would assign fifty-three black men to the USS PC 1264, a 173-foot submarine chaser that cruised three hundred to five hundred miles offshore looking for German U-boats.
Then the Special Programs Unit had its most significant triumph, convincing Admiral Ernest King, chief of naval operations, to place 196 enlisted African Americans along with 44 white officers on the USS Mason, a destroyer escort expected to traverse the Atlantic on convoy missions.51 The ship, still under construction at the Boston Navy Yard, was named for Ensign Newton Henry Mason, a fighter pilot shot down during the Battle of the Coral Sea. Many in the Navy gave it a different name: “Eleanor’s folly” they called it, another slight aimed at the First Lady for her advocacy of integration.
Manning the ships did not, of course, represent total integration or full equality. The two ships would have all-black crews serving under white officers. White and black men would still sleep in different quarters and eat at different tables.
“We are trying to avoid mixing crews on ships,” Knox told reporters. “That puts a limitation on where we can employ Negro seamen.”52
Still, the black press heralded the announcement. For years, civil rights leaders had said that the right to fight and die for one’s country was a crucial step toward making the United States a more perfect union. Having black sailors outside the messman branch serve at sea marked “a distinct departure from present Navy policy and is the culmination of a five-year fight,” the Pittsburgh Courier told its readers.53
But one problem remained beyond the unit’s reach, one symbol of inequality so glaring that it outshone all other successes: at the end of 1943, there were no black officers.
Among the more galling aspects of the Navy’s policy was that, in this case, African American ambition was not being stymied by the usual suspects: Southerners who masked their hatred with talk of tradition. Secretary Knox was from Boston and Michigan. Rear Admiral Jacobs was from Pennsylvania. Admiral King was from Ohio. “Every last one of these men responsible for the Navy’s Jim Crow policy, from stooge to the President himself, is a northerner,” the Baltimore Afro-American said. “The men who are responsible for this un-American policy are not race-baiting hillbillies from the south but northerners whose family trees go back in some instances to the Civil War abolitionists. . . . If Wendell Willkie or Thomas Dewey were president we would not have lily-white fighting ships.”54
The job of convincing Knox that it was finally time to commission black officers fell to Adlai Stevenson, the secretary’s speechwriter and confidant. Stevenson had been brought into the Navy Department in August 1941. Knox, certain that war was imminent and needing a legal advisor and an assistant, had turned to a personable forty-one-year-old lawyer from Chicago whom he had met years before. Stevenson and Knox hit it off right away.
“I’ve a grand job, and I confess I don’t know yet precisely about my duties,” Stevenson told his sister. “Apparently most anything the Secretary wants to unload.”
The two men saw “eye-to-eye on foreign policy,” and though they had strong disagreements on domestic politics, they came to respect one another’s abilities and patriotism.
Knox, always a fan of nicknames, began referring to his more liberal friend as “my New Dealer.” He would tease Stevenson, the future two-time Democratic nominee for president, and tell other government officials that he needed a New Dealer like Stevenson around “to protect me from the New Dealers around here.”
Then, Knox would turn to his speechwriter. “Adlai,” he’d say, “you’re not letting any of ‘em creep in here, are you?”
The two men golfed together in the late afternoons and on weekends, and lunched together in the Navy Department’s private dining room.55 Stevenson became Knox’s alter ego and consummate traveling companion. Stevenson accompanied Knox on his tour of the Pacific in January 1943, writing his speeches, hearing his thoughts, and inspecting naval stations and ships.
“It was 18 nights and a lifetime of adventure,” Stevenson wrote in his diary. Knox spent the long hours traveling from island to island by seaplane, reading dozens of books, and amazing those around him with his concentration, boundless energy, and the rapidity with which he devoured another tome.
It was during that trip that Stevenson first broached the idea of black officers. He suggested it, rather casually, to Admiral Chester Nimitz, who replied that he did not think “Negro units” could make effective “service units.”56
Eight months later, Stevenson understood as well as anyone that the Navy could not postpone meaningful action any longer. The policy was not feasible, the politics no longer tenable.
And no man in the world knew better than Stevenson the precise words that would move Knox.
On the question of integrating the officer corps, Stevenson explained to the efficiency expert that refusing to commission black men was now unquestionably inefficient. The Army, he said, was still recruiting better-educated, better-disciplined black men in large part because that branch offered a path for advancement. If the Navy wanted to keep up, it would have to consider commissioning African American officers.57
There were 60,000 black men in the Navy, and 12,000 more were entering every month, Stevenson wrote to Knox on September 29, 1943. “Obviously, this cannot go on indefinitely without accepting some officers or trying to explain why we don’t. I feel very emphatically that we should commission a few negroes.”
The V-12 Navy College Training Program, Stevenson conceded, might one day produce an African American officer, but no one knew when, though it was certain to take at least another year. That was too long, Stevenson said, and besides, “The pressure will mount both among the negroes and in the Government as well.”
Indeed, one day earlier, Roosevelt had told Lester Granger, president of the National Urban League, “We cannot stand before the world as a champion of oppressed peoples of the world unless we practice as well as preach the principles of democracy ourselves for all men. Racial conflict destroys national unity at home and renders us suspect abroad.”58
Stevenson suggested “10 or 12 negroes selected from top notch civilians just as we procure white officers.” He ended his memo by telling Knox, “If and when it is done, it should not be accompanied by any special publicity but rather treated as a matter of course. The news will get out soon enough.”59
Knox understood Stevenson’s point, but he would not give the order without his admirals’ consent. Knox punted the matter over to the Bureau of Naval Personnel and waited for a response.
While Knox waited for his admirals to decide whether black men deserved a chance at being commissioned as officers, William Sylvester White, a twenty-nine-year-old lawyer who had sought to avoid the military, was finally forced to enlist.
White had hoped that his work as an assistant US attorney for the Northern District of Illinois would keep him out of the war. After all, he reasoned, he was serving the government in another capacity.
He owed his job, an uncommonly estimable position for an African American, to an old friend, some old-school politicking, and good luck.
Back in 1939, White, two years out of the University of Chicago’s law school, had been a small-time lawyer working at a prominent African American law firm. Charles Browning, a friend from Hyde Park High School, dropped by one day to ask White if he might like to be an assistant US attorney.
White laughed. “I’d like it very much,” he said. “I’d like to be a United States Senator. I’d like to be President of the United States. What else is new?”
But his friend wasn’t joking. Roosevelt was ready to appoint William J. Campbell as the new US attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, and Campbell wanted a token African American lawyer in his office.
Roosevelt owed Campbell, who had formed the Young Democrats for Roosevelt in 1932, when Chicago’s powerful Democratic machine was squarely behind Al Smith’s campaign for the nomination. For his loyalty, Campbell was first named Illinois administrator for the president’s National Youth Administration in 1935. When the US attorney spot opened, it was his as well.
White’s career to that point had been rocky. After graduating from law school in 1937, he had clerked for Joseph Clayton on the South Side of Chicago. Clayton, a talented and well-respected lawyer, paid White five dollars per week.
“I wasn’t worth any more than that either,” White later recalled.
Like much of the nation during the 1930s, White was a little desperate and greatly depressed. He even considered abandoning law and gave social work a try, working alongside Lewis “Mummy” Williams, whom he had first met when they were both at the University of Chicago.
But that life wasn’t for him. White’s first big break came when he was hired by Earl Dickerson, one of the few African American attorneys with an office in the Loop, the central business district in the heart of Chicago. Working for Dickerson, the dean of Chicago’s black lawyers and one of the first African American graduates of the University of Chicago Law School, was an entry point for any promising young attorney. But a job as a federal prosecutor came with prestige of a far higher order.
White was now a mini-celebrity, with his photo appearing in magazines that listed him among the “outstanding Negroes in Chicago.”60
It seemed all at once to validate White’s decision to stay in law and his preternatural self-confidence. He had grown up at 6342 Eberhart Avenue on the South Side, two miles south of Arbor and two miles east of Reagan. White’s father, a chemist and pharmacist, was a precinct captain in the city’s sixth ward. His mother was a public school teacher. Together, they instilled in their only son the value of a good education, reminding him that material assets can be stolen, lost, forfeited, and repossessed, but knowledge is a person’s for life. “My father used to tell me,” White said, “that his mother told him that almost anything you get, the white folks can take away from you—except learning.”
